The present invention generally relates to an apparatus for displaying dictionary information in a dictionary used in a natural language process and an apparatus for editing a dictionary by using the above apparatus, and more particularly to an apparatus for displaying dictionary information and an apparatus for editing a dictionary used in a natural language process which is performed in a machine translation system, a database retrieval system, an artificial intelligence system and so on.
In a natural language process, a structure of a natural language sentence is parsed based on grammar and dictionary information. That is, the structure of the natural language sentence is converted into a structure which can be recognized by a system such as the machine translation system. An apparatus for editing the dictionary used in the natural language process is, for example, called a dictionary editor. The dictionary editor edits the dictionary so that the result of the natural language process is that desired by a user. When the dictionary editor edits the dictionary, first the contents in the dictionary are displayed on a display unit. Then the user looks at the display unit and supplies instruction information to modify the dictionary, add dictionary information to the dictionary or delete dictionary information from the dictionary. After this, the dictionary editor modifies the dictionary in accordance with the user's instructions. As a result, it is possible to make a system such as the machine translation system which is capable of outputting the information wanted by the user.
In conventional dictionary editors as disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Nos. 61-70660, 63-10265, 63-136265, 63-223871, the entire contents of the dictionary are displayed on the display unit.
Recently, for example, in the machine translation system, the amount of the contents in the dictionary has been enlarged in order to accurately parse the sentence. That is, the part of speech of each word is further divided into numerous categories. For example, a part of speech "verb" is divided into numerous categories, such as "verb used with an adjective as a complement", "verb used with a noun as a complement" and so on.
Accordingly, if the entire contents of the dictionary are displayed on the display unit, as described above in the case of the conventional dictionary editor, the contents of the numerous categories corresponding to one word are displayed, so that it is difficult for the user to determined whether or not the contents of each category are desired.
On the other hand, when only the contents of the part of speech of each word are displayed on the display unit and the contents of the part of speech are modified, it is difficult to edit the dictionary enough to be able to accurately parse the sentence. For example, in a case where there is no information relating to a category "incomplete intransitive verb" so that the information desired by the user is not obtained, even if information relating to a simple category "verb" is indicated to the user, it is difficult for the user to understand the reason why the information desired by the user can not be obtained.
In addition, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 62-271056 discloses a dictionary editor in which, first, the information relating to the part of speech is indicated to the user, and second, information in numerous categories relating to the part of speech ar indicated. The above dictionary editor also has the same first problem arising in the case where information in numerous categories is displayed on the display unit and the second problem maintained above arising the case where information on a simple part of speech is displayed on the display unit, as has been described above.
The part of speech of a word is called a morphological category. A category of the word which is used in the natural language process is called a syntactic category. That is, the sentence is parsed based on the syntactic category. In this case, the morphological category is formed of numerous syntactics categories.